Exoskeleton

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Things I've written:

[Several people who have been reading this blog missed that I am a writer, so I thought I would post some links to various books and other pieces I've written. I thought this would be quick and easy but it's turning into something quite time-consuming, so I think I'll go back and fill in material as I go along.]

Dear Ra(I wrote this novel in 2000-2001, while moving from Iowa City to Seattle to New York, in the process becoming totally financially broke and personally exhausted. There's also quite a bit of despair about the election of Bush as president. It was published in 2008 by Starcherone, after having been selected by Carol Maso as the runner-up in the now-famous Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason. I noticed somebody complaining about the title. For me it was meant to evoke "Dear Abbey" or some kind of corny teenage thing. But my biggest influence was these letters that an exgirlfriend had collected from working at a magazine published by Hearst, letters insane people would write to Hearst - often addressed to Randolph Hearst. That and the letters of Serial Killers, such as the Zodiac etc. I was really interested in serial killers back then.)

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place:(This book includes poems I wrote way back in my MFA days in the late 90s, but mostly it's stuff I wrote in the first few weeks of being in Athens, GA, where I went to get my PhD, or I went because I was working in an exhaustive job as a landscaper and needed to get back to reading and writing. That was in 2003.)

Secessions:(This was a pretty vast and un-finishable project I worked on for a couple of years, maybe 2004-2006. I decided it's not going to be published. It was inspired by research on Öyvind Fahlström, a Swedish conceptual artist from the 1960s. I love his idea of the "kalas" (party) as opposed to "collage.")La Petite ZineCoconut

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Pilot:(This book was published by Fairytale Review in 2008. It's a story told through translations and re-translations - of birthing manuals, Swedish pop music, Leslie Scalapino and Emily Dickinson poems, fairytales, David Cronenberg movies etc. It's very performance-based; it blends Swedish and English into a kind of awkward language that is supposed to interfere with free and easy performance. That is why paradoxically I don't read this very often at readings. It's tough on the mouth.)

Monday, June 21, 2010

Vacation

I'm not going to write any more blog entries here for a while, as I'm spending the summer finishing up a detective novel and doing work on Action Books and Action, Yes. However, starting in August, I'm going to start a new blog with a different set-up. More about that later.

Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson present readings from their work on Saturday, June 12, 2010. Works by the poets will be available during the event for sale and signing. Broadsides from other "Poets in Print" events and other book arts creations are also available for sale.

This event is free and refreshments are served. Doors open at 6:30.

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Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the sci-fi novel Flet (Fence Books) and the noir Nylund, the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as two books of poetry from Fence. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and, with Johannes Goransson, is co-founder and co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-journal for international writing and hybrid forms.

Johannes Göransson is the author of books of prose and poetry - Dear Ra, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Pilot ("Johann the Carousel Horse") - and the translator of a number of others - most recently Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonson and With Deer by Aase Berg. He co-edits Action Books and Action, Yes, and he teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Harp & Altar

There's an excellent issue of the journal Harp and Altar, including fine work by sometime Exoskeleton commentor Ana B and some other folks I already knew about and some folks I didn't (great little poems by someone named Matthew Klane). Anyway, that's what I'm reading this morning instead of working on my heroic pornography.

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Seven Corners

Steve Halle has been kind enough to have me as the Featured Poet on his blog Seven Corners. The poems are from Scarlet Street, a manuscript I finished this winter. The title is from the noir film starring Edward G. Robinson, and the manuscript as a whole deals with my obsession with various directors and movies--Godard, Guy Maddin, Carl Dreyer, Hitchcock, Wong Kar-Wai, Catherine Breillat, Jack Smith, Stanley Kubrick, and others.